Coaches on the Move, What Will Become of Mike D’Antoni

The playoffs are underway and that means it is a great time to be a basketball fan. No, our Lakers aren’t in the second season but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy good basketball being played. I tried to catch as much hoops as I could over the weekend and I was pretty impressed with what I saw from everyone on the court (save the Pacers and the referees).

The start of the second season doesn’t just bring the on court stylings of the worlds best players, however. It also brings off court moves from the teams who were not good enough to qualify for extended seasons. In other words, coaching changes are afoot across the league with three head men leaving their posts today.

In Minnesota, Rick Adelman stepped down from his position, retiring after a fine career that saw him reach high levels of success at nearly every spot. As coach of the Blazers he reached two NBA Finals and was a major thorn in the side of the Lakers in the late 80’s and early 90’s. A decade later he helped turn around a terrible Kings franchise and turned them into real title contenders, pushing the Shaq/Kobe Lakers as hard as anyone in the playoffs in the process. He then moved onto Houston where he coached Yao, McGrady, and our old friend Ron Artest to results severely impacted by injuries to his stars.

His latest run with the Wolves was unspectacular in many ways — he failed to reach the post season a single time — but that should not diminish what he accomplished in previous stops. Adelman was a great coach who just so happened to have his best teams at the same times when the Showtime Lakers, Bad Boy Pistons, Jordan Bulls, and Shaq/Kobe Lakers were also at their best. Sometimes bad timing trumps ability.

While Adelman stepped away under his own power, the other two vacancies were not choices made by the coaches. In New York and Utah respectively, Mike Woodson and Ty Corbin both received their walking papers after poor seasons.

Woodson, only a year removed from a 50 win season saw a major regression from his Knicks this season. Poor defense, an offensive strategy that diverted from what worked last season, and injuries derailed his team’s season. And while the latter can’t be blamed on him, the former two certainly can be. Add in Phil Jackson coming in as the top basketball decision maker and it was only a matter of time before Woodson was shown the door in favor of a coach that fits what he wants to do (i.e. run the Triangle).

As for the Jazz, they let go of Corbin after 3 seasons of “rebuilding” that has not produced any tangible results. After trading Deron Williams, the Jazz have been one of the worst teams in the league, drafting in the lottery each season but not developing that talent into the types of high end contributors that change a team’s fortunes from cellar dweller to playoff team. Some of that must be placed at the feet of Corbin, a coach who hasn’t deployed rotations in a way that seem to make sense often enough while also not being creative enough on both sides of the ball schematically to support those decisions. Soon it will be someone else’s turn to try and optimize that talent and grow it in a way that returns the Jazz to the days they saw under Jerry Sloan. That is a tall task, of course, and following in a legend coach’s footsteps is never easy. Maybe the next coach will have enough distance from those days to escape that shadow.

As for the Lakers, there is no news on Mike D’Antoni’s status and there likely won’t be any coming soon. Coming out of the team’s exit interviews last week, the only definitive statements made from either Mitch Kupchak or D’Antoni was that no decision would happen quickly and that the coach is under contract for at least one more season (the Lakers have a team option for the coach’s 4th season). Purposely vague, those statements shed zero light on the situation and don’t even give a hint as to what the organization is thinking.

I, for one, am okay with this for now. Unlike what occurred with Jazz, for example, the Lakers haven’t had a slew of high picks go underdeveloped or underused. And unlike in NY, the Lakers have been brutalized by injuries to the point that it’s difficult seeing how coaching to a different style would have made a huge difference in their win/loss record (though, to be fair, the Knicks have also dealt with injuries — just not to the level the Lakers have).

So, we wait. The front office is preaching patience and I think that has as much to do with them asking for fans understanding that there is a rebuild (or a drastic retooling) upon us, but also because they will simply take their time to make a decision. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, even though it’s a perfectly reasonable argument that the team should know what it has in this coach at this point. Yes, the injuries matter and so do a slew of other factors, but they understand his philosophy and tendencies by now. Weighing those things against each other is worth exploring, but it should not take forever. I would imagine that at some point in the next two to three weeks we will know for sure what’s what.

In the meantime, watch some playoff hoops. The games are good, even if they do serve as a daily reminder that the Lakers need to get much better.